If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Linux 2.6.32 Kernel Is Nearing An End

Phoronix: Linux 2.6.32 Kernel Is Nearing An End

On Sunday marked the release of the 58th point release for the Linux 2.6.32 kernel by Greg Kroah-Hartman. The Linux 2.6.32.58 kernel now marks the passing of this kernel series into its extended-long-term maintenance window...

2.6.32 is also the kernel running in RedHat Enterprise Linux 6.x - not that far into its 1 year life cycle. Maybe GKH isn't going to maintiain 2.6.32, but somebody certainly will be. (I would swear that there are 3.0+ changes already in the RedHat "2.6.32" kernel, though at the moment I can't recall what.)

2.6.32 is also the kernel running in RedHat Enterprise Linux 6.x - not that far into its 1 year life cycle. Maybe GKH isn't going to maintiain 2.6.32, but somebody certainly will be. (I would swear that there are 3.0+ changes already in the RedHat "2.6.32" kernel, though at the moment I can't recall what.)

The XFS metadata scalability patches / other performance patches are backported to RHEL's 2.6.32. Also probably KVM patches. Red Hat is pretty narcissistic: basically anything kernel-related that's maintained by one of their engineers gets "automatically" backported to RHEL, but they're extremely unlikely to backport anything maintained by some other company. For all their exemplar behavior and good reputation (which I actually do admire), they definitely have a Not Invented Here cultural bias over there in the back country of North Carolina.

Basically, vanilla 2.6.32 just contains security and non-breaking bugfix updates. RHEL 2.6.32 is much closer to 3.0 than its version string suggests, except that certain things (namely driver APIs, for the most part) are kept "the old way" to maintain compatibility with third-party kernel sources that expect 2.6.32 behavior for a 2.6.32 kernel. Otherwise VMware / VBox / etc. modules would be extremely confused when building against a RHEL kernel that claims it's 2.6.32 but works like a 3.0.